Gamasutra
is reporting 35 employees of Perpetual Entertainment have been laid off, calling
this a cost-cutting move to support a delay to the release of Gods and Heroes:
Rome Rising.
The Perpetual Forums (thanks
FiringSquad) confirm the departures, however, they characterize this as
normal turnover resulting from the completion of content production roles on the
upcoming MMORPG, though they do confirm the reported delay:

I am posting
this message on behalf of Chris McKibbin, President & Co-founder of Perpetual:

As some of you may have heard we have made some staffing changes at Perpetual.
We are proud to announce that we are within a month of being content complete on
Gods & Heroes: Rome Rising , our upcoming AAA MMO title. As we achieve this
major development milestone, a number of content production roles come to an
end. The Gods & Heroes team remains over 80 talented people strong as we enter
the final phase prior to launch -- play-testing and tuning to deliver the
highest quality game possible. In addition, because we value the feedback our
beta testers have been giving us, and because we want to ship the highest
quality game possible, we have moved our target ship date from the spring to the
summer of 2007. This extension of the testing and tuning phase of the project
will allow us to focus entirely on making a great game – which is our #1 goal.

Perpetual remains 100% committed to shipping a fantastic Gods & Heroes game and
to continuing development of the much-anticipated Star Trek Online .